Lexical chains and topic continuity in the register of popular
scientific writing
German-English contrasts
Nicole Hützen |
Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen University
Tatiana Serbina |
Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen University
This article presents a corpus study of lexical chains in the register of popular
scientific writing, based on the English and German original texts included in
the CroCo Corpus. This register is characterized by patterns resulting from the
combination of accessible knowledge and scientific validity. The study aims at
investigating cross-linguistic differences in terms of frequency and length of
lexical chains. Chain elements are extracted by identifying the most frequent
noun per text (and any lexical items associated with it by synonymy, hyponymy,
or meronymy). The sentence IDs in the corpus markup are used to automatically
calculate distances between occurrences of the target items. The analysis of
immediacy chains and discontinuities in chains supports the investigation of
contrasts in terms of topic continuity patterns.
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